Highlights:

The general insurance industry delivered mixed performance in Q3FY2022. Segments such as the motor insurance witnessed continued headwinds due to heightened competitive intensity, chip shortages in the four wheeler segment and weak festive demand in the two wheeler segment.

Health insurance on other hand continued to show robust growth primarily driven by group health, while growth in retail health has moderated since Q2FY22 due to base effect.

Within the commercial lines, segments such as Fire, Marine and Engineering lines witnessed strong growth in sync with current market environment.

Overall, the industry registered a growth of 11.2% in 9MFY2022 and a growth of 8.0% in Q3FY2022.

The combined ratio of the Industry was 119.3% in H1FY2022 as compared to 105.6% in H1FY2021. Further, the overall combined ratio of the private multi-line general insurers was 112.4% in H1FY2022 as compared to 103.2% in H1FY2021

The company has been making investments to benefit from the opportunity that the current environment has to offer, especially in the retail health segment. These investments are enabling to gain market share in preferred line of business.

The company has on-boarded 400 employees out of the 1000 headcount to be added in retail health agency salesforce. This is leading to month on month improvement in growth and the company expects the growth through this channel to accelerate in the next few quarters as the salesforce starts getting productive.

The growth of the health benefit segment was impacted due to base effect for first three quarters of FY2022. Going ahead, the company expects this channel to continue to deliver robust growth.

In group health segment continuous direct engagement with large corporates enabled to retain over 90% of customers at a higher price thereby showing improvement in premium per life since June 2021.

In Motor, the company continued to combat challenges from the lack of Motor TP rate hike for over two consecutive years, heightened competitive intensity in Motor OD, chip shortages in new private car sales etc. However expectation is that these are short term challenges.

Within the commercial lines, the company have seen strong growth and believe growth will continue.

In current times, the major trend has been the significant increase in online buying by consumers and the company has been continuously investing on this front.

The business sourced through website grew by 20.0% in Q3FY2022. Within this Health business grew by 22.9%. Travel business grew by 156.9%. Motor business grew by 11.9%.

The business sourced through Strategic alliance partners in the digital ecosystem grew at 70.2% in Q3FY2022.

DigitalOne business is fully empowered to deep mine customer data, fine tune customer outreach efforts, service customers through claim system that enables real-time communication, and thereby optimise cost of acquisition.

The company remains on track and is focused on growth levers such as strengthening distribution engine aided by lowered base effect, realising synergy, rationalising cost while scaling up preferred lines of business, servicing customers with excellence, digital advancements, that will enable to sustain the return on equity objective over long term.

The company has been expanding distribution network to increase penetration in tier 3 and tier 4 cities. Agents (including Point of sale or POS) count increased to 81,969 end December 2021, from 78,035 end September 2021.

On merger deal with Bharti Axa, the company was able to smoothly transition and onboard partners to seamlessly operate with minimal disruption. Apart from immediate benefit, this transaction entails an opportunity to unlock significant operational and revenue synergies in times to come. The company is on right path on roadmap of realising the synergy benefits by the second half of FY2023.